Radio Ireland All Day On The Village 3/17

goreds2 · #1 03-04-2009, 02:34 PM

RADIO IRELAND - XM 15 (Not available on SIRIUS)

RADIO IRELAND is a musical tip of the cap to the sounds of Ireland in celebration of the St. Patrick's Day! It's artists like The Chieftains, James Galway, The Clancy Brothers and The Dubliners, plus old style singers like Dennis Day and Bing Crosby. Radio Ireland is the perfect soundtrack for your St. Patrick's Day whether you're from the streets of Dublin, Ireland or Dublin, Ohio!

Tune In:
All Day, Tuesday, 3/17

XM Satellite Radio Canada - The Village

Here is what SIRIUS will air on their channel 113

RADIO IRELAND
Radio Ireland is a musical tip of the cap to the sounds of Ireland in celebration of the St. Patrick's Day! It’s artists like The Chieftains, James Galway, The Clancy Brothers and The Dubliners, plus old style singers like Dennis Day and Bing Crosby. Radio Ireland is the perfect soundtrack for your St. Patrick's Day whether you're from the streets of Dublin, Ireland or Dublin, Ohio!

SIRIUS Satellite Radio - Specials

flap_jackson · #2 03-04-2009, 02:53 PM

How bad is the XM webmaster? He still has dead links to Party City and Holiday Traditions on the XM Specials page

Anyways, why preempt the Village when you have a waste of channel space, that Sirius is actually using? Is XM just going to let their exclusive channels go by the wayside everytime the opportunity comes? What's next, Cinemagic

snakester · #3 03-04-2009, 02:59 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by flap_jackson

Anyways, why preempt the Village when you have a waste of channel space, that Sirius is actually using? Is XM just going to let their exclusive channels go by the wayside everytime the opportunity comes? What's next, Cinemagic

XM's system is different from Sirius'. Even if they put it on the Specials channel, they have to take the bandwidth from somewhere. The Specials channel running the off air loop takes up virtually no bandwidth (that's how they have like 20 baseball channels; they all play the same loop until a game comes on, taking a grand total of 16-ish kbit/sec) . To get the bandwidth to run the channel, they have to pre-empt. And that's why we lose the Village for a day.

EDIT: Just for the record, the reason the system was designed like this is because back in the day, XM used to run much higher bitrates (in the 48-64kbit range), so they could "borrow" bandwidth from channels in order for special events and sports. Let's say that two baseball games were coming on. Sports streams on their system are 16kbit/sec. Let's say that 20 on 20 was running 56kbit/sec and Ethel was running 48kbit/sec. They could "borrow" 16kbit/sec from both channels, leaving Ethel with 32 and 20 on 20 with 40 for the duration of the games. Then they assign that bandwidth to two of the "virtual" baseball channels (the loop they play is really just one channel) and when the games are over they give the bandwidth back, returning 20 on 20 to 56 and Ethel to 48kbit. Need room for a special event channel? Take 24 from 20 and 20 and 16 from Ethel, and you have 40kbit, enough for a music channel.

Why doesn't this work anymore? Well, they only have a limited amount of bandwidth within the ~4mhz of spectrum they use. When they added Best of Sirius, and all the other stuff that came with the merger, they stole bandwidth from other channels. You can't borrow something that's not there, and since the music channels are pretty much all 32kbit now (any lower and the codec quickly and undeniably descends into the realm of "sloppy ass" in terms of audio quality) their only choice is to totally take a channel off the air for a special event. I can't wait to see how many channels they're going to have to pre-empt on a busy sports day

flap_jackson · #4 03-04-2009, 06:21 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by snakester

XM's system is different from Sirius'. Even if they put it on the Specials channel, they have to take the bandwidth from somewhere. The Specials channel running the off air loop takes up virtually no bandwidth (that's how they have like 20 baseball channels; they all play the same loop until a game comes on, taking a grand total of 16-ish kbit/sec) . To get the bandwidth to run the channel, they have to pre-empt. And that's why we lose the Village for a day.

EDIT: Just for the record, the reason the system was designed like this is because back in the day, XM used to run much higher bitrates (in the 48-64kbit range), so they could "borrow" bandwidth from channels in order for special events and sports. Let's say that two baseball games were coming on. Sports streams on their system are 16kbit/sec. Let's say that 20 on 20 was running 56kbit/sec and Ethel was running 48kbit/sec. They could "borrow" 16kbit/sec from both channels, leaving Ethel with 32 and 20 on 20 with 40 for the duration of the games. Then they assign that bandwidth to two of the "virtual" baseball channels (the loop they play is really just one channel) and when the games are over they give the bandwidth back, returning 20 on 20 to 56 and Ethel to 48kbit. Need room for a special event channel? Take 24 from 20 and 20 and 16 from Ethel, and you have 40kbit, enough for a music channel.

Why doesn't this work anymore? Well, they only have a limited amount of bandwidth within the ~4mhz of spectrum they use. When they added Best of Sirius, and all the other stuff that came with the merger, they stole bandwidth from other channels. You can't borrow something that's not there, and since the music channels are pretty much all 32kbit now (any lower and the codec quickly and undeniably descends into the realm of "sloppy ass" in terms of audio quality) their only choice is to totally take a channel off the air for a special event. I can't wait to see how many channels they're going to have to pre-empt on a busy sports day

This guy is too damn smart

Thanks for the info

But I still don't get where Sirius is getting the extra bandwidth for the day. Do they just have a bunch of empty space just floating around that they only use for special events and sports, or is Sirius on a totally different system?

snakester · #5 03-04-2009, 10:37 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by flap_jackson

This guy is too damn smart

Thanks for the info

But I still don't get where Sirius is getting the extra bandwidth for the day. Do they just have a bunch of empty space just floating around that they only use for special events and sports, or is Sirius on a totally different system?

They use a similar system, I'm not as well versed on it but the way I understand it is although they need to push a channel mapping update to change channel numbers, they still have the ability to do "virtual" channels and allocate bandwidth (I actually remember when they launched BofXM, the first channel update they pushed listed the best of XM sports loop as channel 244 with the name "Barker". Oops. They fixed it the next day though). ch. 20 and 21 are examples I can think of off the top of my head that they steal from for Best of XM sports (they can't just run them on their normal PBP pre-emption channels, would defeat the purpose of BoXM)... listen to one of those channels during the morning then at night when there are a lot of basketball/hockey games and if you have a decent ear there's a stark difference.

I'm also pretty sure that the Specials channel is allocated all the bandwidth it's even gonna get; I remember Bing Crosby Christmas sounding absolutely horrible on the Sirius side, while it had the sound quality of a high-tier talk channel on the XM side. I may be totally wrong on this one though; they may steal some extra bandwidth for it.

Needless to say I was a super-fan back in the day (as in a year or two agO)

riskybzns · #6 03-09-2009, 07:47 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by goreds2

RADIO IRELAND - XM 15 (Not available on SIRIUS)

for crying out loud, this merger has been one of the worst things in business history!

snakester · #7 03-09-2009, 08:52 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by riskybzns

for crying out loud, this merger has been one of the worst things in business history!

The original post wasn't worded the best. Sirius folks will still be getting Radio Ireland, just on the specials channel (113 i think?)

riskybzns · #8 03-09-2009, 09:09 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by snakester

Sirius folks will still be getting Radio Ireland, just on the specials channel (113 i think?)

113 is correct

goreds2 · #9 03-16-2009, 07:50 PM

Tonight on XM165: (not available on SIRIUS)

Coast to Coast
10:00 PM - 1:00 AM est.

Dr. Bob Curran will discuss the origins of St. Patricks Day and beliefs behind legends and mystical beings such as Irish Fairies, The Irish Banshee, Leprechauns
and The Witches of Ireland.

He will also talk about stories from Ireland including the tradition of the Shamrock.